


when i'm a dead boy.

by ShameGame



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Canon-Typical Violence, Dick Jokes, Friends to Lovers, Guns, Humanstuck, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Injury, M/M, Major Character Injury, Slow Build, Supernatural Elements, Trans Character, more TBA - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 01:14:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13283832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShameGame/pseuds/ShameGame
Summary: Yeah, sure, there's that whole popular idiom about life and lemons that optimists never seem to stop spewing out like an unending stream of vomit, and if the circumstances were any different, maybe, justmaybeyou'd be willing to take a page out of their collective book of vague, yet uplifting advice.But the circumstances aren't any different.So what the fuck are you supposed to do when life gives one of your best friends a ticking time bomb?





	when i'm a dead boy.

“Pardon me for being the shit-sniffing realist with an _Encyclopedia of Everything That Was and Ever Will Be_ lodged so far up my ass that my brain can acquire its wisdom through sheer proximity, but I’m pretty sure everyone has dreams of dying. I mean, just last week I dreamed about getting a fucking paper cut and subsequently dying over a mild case of cellulitis.”

Two cents duly shared, you chew at the tail end of your straw and watch Dave’s usually vacant face twist into something undecipherable.

“Dude, you’re not vibing with me here.”

“If your alternate choice in phrasing for the word ‘understanding’ is ‘vibing with me,’ I’m glad I’m not on your wavelength.”

“Regardless,” he says. “Something weird happened last night and for once in my life, I’m having trouble putting it into words.”

You take another long, deep slurp of your sugary abomination of a smoothie to stall for time, just trying to mull over his story again. Dave just sits and waits patiently, aviator-clad eyes trained straight on you. He hasn’t even touched his fries.

“So,” you say once you’re finished. “You had a sword fight with your older brother. He accidentally caught you in the throat with his shitty katana, and you died. Now, what about this dream is responsible for making you act like you got your privates wedged into a revolving door?”

Your question must force him to do a little more self-assessing, because he immediately dials back the urgency in his posture, sinking a little further back into the booth’s cushions.

“I’unno. It just felt realer than usual, I guess,” he answers, and you can tell he’s deflated a bit, losing that trademark bite that anxiety loves giving out like a party favor for a depressing get-together. But he continues. “Y’know how when you get hurt in a dream, half the time you panic not because you’re feeling anything, but because you know you’re supposed to be feeling something?”

You blink. “Sure.”

“I felt it that sword go right through my windpipe. Like one of those dumbass videos where some hotshot STEM major heats a knife up a thousand degrees and goes around whacking up a couple of sticks of butter for two million views.”

While he’s talking you take a glance at his hands, and he’s white-knuckling the edge of the table.

It must’ve hurt a lot.

“Jesus Christ,” you say, and you’re starting to hate the way Dave’s frown is getting more and more perpetual--it’s miles worse than when his mouth is a flat line, and you already hate when it’s a flat line. “Maybe we need to get Serket’s scraggly ass to give you a once-over.”

Then Dave is immediately on the defensive, saying he’d rather face the familial chopping block a thousand times before letting Serket dig her clammy hands into his headspace. He spouts out something about her psychoanalyzing Jade in order to find a cure for her furry-tendencies, and it’s so stupid you nearly weep tears of blood.

And at that point you both seem to want to move on from the whole morbid topic Dave had flopped onto the diner’s table, so you do.

By the time you head back to the dorms and he heads back to his apartment, the entire discussion is long-gone from your head.

That’s just how dreams are, after all.

 

* * *

 

Everybody’s talking about a triple homicide that happened a mile away from campus during your lecture the next day.

“Some woman killed her husband and their two children,” Sollux tells you when the professor gives you time to collaborate with your classmates. “She put rat poison in the guy’s chili, and shoved the kids in a shed behind the house then let them starve.”

“Pretty creative compared to most homicides around here,” Aradia tacks on with her usual weird, tactless smile. “It’s usually just ‘stab, stab, stab.’”

Sollux snorts. “You mispronounced ‘morbid,’ AA.”

“Things can be both creative _and_ morbid--they’re not exclusive!” she counters, and you roll your eyes as they both continue to bicker for a few minutes. But then you get curious.

“Do we know why she did it?”

They both give you mild shrugs.

“The police haven’t made a statement yet,” Aradia says. “But it seems to be another crime of passion.”

That makes this what, the third in two months? They come and go so fast it’s hard to keep track, but the more you think about it, the more concerning it is.

Back in your hometown, one murder case was enough to keep the town in an uproar for months, even years, but for here? It’s almost a commonplace. And the crime rate in general is disproportionately high compared to the rest of the country. Kankri would probably say something dumb about it; maybe northerners were better at talking out their problems while small-town southerners were prone to bottling up their anger. But you? You just shrug, and pray to your Dad’s God that you never get tangled up in that horseshit.

“As long as she’s not still running around with a bottle of rat poison or shoving kids into confined spaces, it’s fine by me,” you mutter, and all Sollux and Aradia can do is offer hums of agreement before the professor’s talking, and you have to go back to focusing on class.

 

* * *

 

You’re studying the diagram of a pig carcass when Dave calls you Wednesday night. You have two days before your Bio test and you’ve been staring at the pages of your lab notebook for so long that if you close your eyes, you’ll probably get a painstakingly detailed black-and-white diagram of pig genitalia as an afterimage.

So when your phone starts vibrating, you answer it immediately.

“I don’t know whether I should slap you or prostrate on the ground and kiss your fucking shoes in thanks for the reprieve,” you deadpan.

“Uh,” Dave says, which is not how he typically would respond. You quirk up an eyebrow.

“Are you busy?” he asks.

You side-eye your sprawl of notes, then give a thoughtful hum. “Yeah, but I can allot some time for whatever bullshit you’re gearing up to throw at me.”

“Wow, how generous.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Anyways, I’ve got a bit of a request,” Dave says. “And uh, I would’ve asked John, but he’s already back up in Washington so it wouldn’t’ve worked out--”

He loves doing this whole song and dance when he’s nervous, so you interrupt. “Just spit it out.”

“Can I stay over at your room tonight?”

You live in a single, so it’s not like you’d need to go on a ten-step quest for clearance from a roommate. No skin off your back. Still, considering the mild discomfort associated with dorm living in general, his request is kind of weird. You don’t want to push him for an explanation… But also you _do_ want to push.

“Any reason in particular?” you ask.

He hesitates, and something in the pit of your stomach does that telltale twist of suspicion; Dave’s being fucking suspicious.

“Nothing that I can properly vocalize over the phone,” he belatedly answers. “I guess I just want a little vacation out of the apartment? So, yeah.”

‘So, yeah,’ is not a phrase typically used by a mentally sound Dave Strider. It’s too conclusive.

He had a golden opportunity to rail your ass with an outlandish spiel with obscure actors and B-rated films that’d indirectly make fun of your taste in cinema--it was sitting right there, out in the open--and he didn’t take it. You’re pretty sure whatever emotion that realization is making you feel is along the lines of watching an extremely old dog refuse to eat.

You close your lab notebook.

“I’ll walk on over and we can head to my dorm room together,” you say, and he starts protesting before you mutter, “See you in ten,” and hang up on him.

You’re not the type to nurture. You like to tell yourself that you’re not the type to give a _damn_ , even if it’s a big fucking lie half the time. But something about this whole situation has you feeling nauseous, and that’s enough to drag you up off your ass.

You grab your coat, lock the door on your way out, and start walking.

 

* * *

 

He acts like he’s concussed the whole time you’re together. He does a lot of hesitating, a lot of trailing off in the middle of conversations, and at one point you feel obligated to straight-up ask if his older brother had given him a brand-spanking new head injury, to which he quickly replies, “Nah.”

When you make it back to your room, you give him a quick tour.

“The bathroom’s outside and to the right, the bed’s right there, and you have eyes and hopefully more than two brain cells, so the rest is up for you to puzzle out, Sherlock,” you say.

“Aiight,” he says back. He’s always been light on his feet, and tonight’s no different--he glides over to the closet and dumps his bag inside, then kicks off his shoes. He keeps on the scarf, though. You sit down at your desk, flipping your lab notebook back open.

Starting from the top of the diagram, there’s the larynx, the trachea, the thyroid gland, the thymus gland--

“--Yo Karkat, are there any spare blankets lying around I can borrow? I’ve got to get cracking on making a bitchin’ nest.”

You glance up, expression flat. “I’m taking the floor tonight, asshat.”

He runs a hand through his hair, obviously distressed by this. “C’mon man, any more hospitality and I’ll barf all over your nice carpet out of sheer stress. Don’t do that to me. Help a bro out; let him take a snooze on the floor.”

Glad to see his rambling is making a bit of a resurgence, even if it’s weak.

“If you want to be nice just toss one of the pillows from the bed onto the floor, then take your useless flapping mouth, and snap it shut.”

So he shuts the fuck up, gently places one of your pillows onto the floor, and finally climbs into your bed.

Then he dicks around on his phone for a couple of hours while you keep studying, and you study until your eyes itch and tear up from the artificial lighting of your room.

“Okay, I think it’s time to drop into a temporary coma,” you announce at three a.m.

“Sounds good,” he says, and whatever rough edges he was sporting earlier seem carefully concealed now. You don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

You take off your binder and you both brush your teeth and he manages to snag the blankets from the closet that you’re too short to easily reach, and soon enough, the lights are off and you’re settled in for the night.

“Thanks for letting me crash here,” he mumbles a few minutes after it’s been firmly established that you can’t see each others’ faces. “I know it was pretty impromptu, but I was going crazy back at the apartment.”

You’re too tired for a trademark response, so you just sympathetically hum.

“Am I stomping on whatever boundaries we have set up here if I ask what was wrong?”

Dave goes quiet.

He stays quiet for long enough that you assume you’re not getting an answer, and that’s fine, you’re three half-skips away from going clinically brain dead anyways.

And right when you’re about to fall asleep, he speaks up.

“I saw something I wasn’t supposed to. Bro knows I saw it too, but he’s not acting like anything about it seemed off. It just. Rubbed me the wrong way. Like sandpaper on fish scales. Or Adam Sandler starring in a movie in literally any genre besides comedy.”

Huh.

“Sounds serious,” you murmur.

“Maybe,” he responds, and you can just barely pick out his silhouette, half-hanging off of your bed so that he can talk to you easier. “But I hope not.”

...

You hope so too.

 

* * *

 

You head back up north for Thanksgiving break, and it’s a fresh breath of air you didn’t know you needed. Dad is hellbent on keeping you well-fed and well-rested as an apology for the past few months. It’s hard to complain over eating three meals and sleeping over six hours for multiple days in a row. Meanwhile, Kankri’s always been bearable in small doses, and five days of familial companionship is the just-right amount. Your break is a haze of empty thoughts and easy conversations with some old friends you haven’t been able to talk to as much these days.

You, Dave, and John all try keep in touch through your trashy, outdated MMO, even if it’s not as fun as when you were thirteen.

John, the self-proclaimed “friendleader,” pushes you through a few dungeons, doing a stupid programmed dance at the mouth of each dungeon’s entryway “for encouragement! :)” before diving in headfirst; you and Dave reluctantly follow.

You’re all high-level enough that this doesn’t really have any impact on your progress bars, and the resources you put in (i.e. time, patience) greatly outweigh the benefits, but still. It’s nostalgic.

It’s all sunshine, rainbows and dicktickles in your online world up until halfway through one battle Dave starts keyboard smashing for no damn reason. And he keyboard smashes like a fucking champ, just endless line after line of “dakfjaskl;dfjaks;jfoaiewfjioandkl;ag”.

You watch the lower left corner of your screen fill up with red text, your mouth a flat line. His avatar’s at a standstill.

You and John wordlessly scramble to clean up the area, and when that ordeal’s over, Dave’s stopped typing. John speaks up first. The broken caps lock key on your old home computer probably wouldn’t mesh well with the situation anyways.

 

EB: dave?

EB: are you ok?

 

You let out a sigh of relief when the text bar says that Dave is typing. And he keeps typing. He stops typing, probably backtracking. He types out something else.

 

TG: sorry

TG: my brain just astral projected into the nearest garbage disposal and flicked on the on switch

TG: someone uploaded my brain onto a computer program and then clicked a button to randomize all the goddamn code

TG: some other clever third comparison idek that was just fuckin ugly

TG: guess my hands thought so too huh

TG: sorry guys didnt mean to get spooky there

TG: yall cleared out the dungeon while i was mia by the looks of it

 

Unbelievable.

You’re halfway through typing out a strongly-worded suggestion to go see a doctor when Dave interrupts.

 

TG: ok wow this headache aint letting up

TG: i think i gotta bounce

TG: send me a text the next time you guys get online k

TG: gnight

 

He logs off.

You glare at your screen.

 

EB: jeez.

EB: any idea what’s up with him?

 

You and Dave hadn’t really brought up your psuedo-sleepover since it happened two weeks ago, but then again, he _had_ mentioned that he was originally going to ask John. So whatever conversations you had that night are probably O.K. to kind of disclose.

 

CG: I’VE BEEN FOLLOWING THE SHITTILY ASSEMBLED TRAIL OF BREADCRUMBS STRIDER STARTED LAYING OUT FOR ME ABOUT TWO WEEKS AGO LIKE AN UGLIER, LESS-CHARMING HANSEL AND GRETEL MELDED INTO ONE UNFORTUNATE POST-PUBESCENT TRAINWRECK OF A HUMAN BEING.

CG: HE’S BEEN TRYING TO KEEP ME AT A DISTANCE ABOUT IT.

CG: I ASKED AND HE JUST SAID IT HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH HIS BROTHER.

CG: FROM A LESS SUBSTANTIATED STANDPOINT AND TREKKING A LITTLE FURTHER DOWN THAT AFOREMENTIONED TRASH PATH, EVEN IF DAVE DENIES IT, I THINK IT’S ANOTHER CONCUSSION.

 

John’s fast to reply.

 

EB: oh no.

EB: :(

 

That sums things up pretty well.

 

CG: YEAH.

CG: :( SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT.

 

You both say goodnight, and log off.

 

* * *

 

The morning before you go back to campus, you get an email from the campus security.

You see the words “high-profile,” “charged with battery,” and “motives unknown” before you sign out of your account, turn off your phone, and bury yourself back under your covers, hoping to get at least another hour of dreamless sleep.

 

* * *

 

 You manage to catch Dave about halfway through the first week you’re back at school.

It doesn’t take much, just a simple text giving a time (six p.m.), a place (Derspit Diner--the usual), and a not-so-serious threat of bodily harm (“If you don’t show up, I’ll snap your spine over my knee like a flimsy fucking toothpick.”).

And sure enough, he shows up.

He’s wearing the scarf he was wearing the last time you saw him in person, this time paired with a beanie pulled so far down it almost swallows his ears.

You don’t comment on it, but you _do_ make fun of him in your head.

He never really managed to shake his Houston roots out, even though him and his brother moved a couple of years ago. This sub-60 degree weather must be at a bamboo-shoots-under-your-fingernails level of torture.

You talk about mundane shit for the most part. How your break was, how Dave’s job as a part-time DJ is going, whether or not the developers for your MMO game are finally going to take the time to fix that one bug where if you jump at the wrong time, you clip through the floor and get stuck.

“Speaking of weird, anxiety-inducing bugs,” you say--the goddamn master of smooth conversational transitions, and Dave groans, already knowing what you’re leading up to.

“Dude, it was one little freak out, and after a nap I was A-OK. Stop telling me to see a doctor.”

“You practically had a seizure while John and I sat around with our hands down our pants and no idea what to do,” you argue. “If that doesn’t spike your blood pressure at least a little, then you’re devoid of absolutely any soul.”

He makes a noise from the back of his throat. “I’ll call up a doctor when I know I genuinely need a doctor, Karks. Pinkie promise.”

You scoff. “What, are you twelve--?” you start, but his attention snaps away from you like a cat that just heard a can of wet food being opened from somewhere within a five-mile radius. You watch him watch someone behind you for a few heavy moments before clearing your throat.

Dave practically jumps in his seat.

“Dropping everything to go eye-bang a stranger is fine and all,” you grouse, “but don’t you dare consider doing it while I’m the unfortunate fuck sitting right across from you.”

He grimaces. “That wasn’t my game, bud. But…” he leans a little to the side, trying to get a better view. He’s not subtle at all.

“But _what?_ ” you grit.

“How long has that couple a few booths behind us been there?”

There’s no way you can be stealthy about it, so you just twist and look. Then you twist and turn back to face Dave.

“You’re asking me that question like I’m an NSA agent constantly surveying the scene and racking up intel on potential figures of suspect in your big, tacky game of Clue,” you deadpan. “The answer is ‘I have no idea.’”

Dave sighs through his nose, which is pretty much his strongest way of showing disappointment. “Does anything about them seem off to you, though?”

You think it over for a second.

“Besides the fact that they look like they’re genuinely considering a hot and heavy makeout right here in my holy sanctuary of artery-clogging good eats, no.”

“Huh,” he says.

“Was I supposed to be seeing something weird?” you ask.

He goes to do that one nervous tick he has--the one where he runs his hand through his hair--but he cuts himself off, remembering the hat he’s wearing. He stiffly puts his arm back down, forearm resting against the edge of the table.

“I guess not,” he replies. “Maybe it was just a trick of the light.”

You try to usher him back into your earlier conversation and give him a proper scolding for the gaping hole in his personality where self-preservation should be living, but his heart’s not into it; his eyes keep drifting back over your shoulder, like whatever he’s seeing absolutely _cannot_ afford to be ignored. It scares you a bit. It’s as if he’s painfully aware that something is slobbering down your neck but he’s too self-conscious to tell you to duck, or to turn around, or to run for the fucking hills, and you can’t tell if that lack of disclosure is making you angry or depressed--maybe both.

The rest of your diner outing sucks, and it’s all because of some big, invisible, man-eating elephant in the room that Dave refuses to describe to you.

‘Trick of the light’ your ass.

 

* * *

 

He gets weird after that.

Well, weirder than usual.

You drag him out of his apartment for asinine little errands that don’t really require two people, but the breathers away from Dave’s brother have got to be good for him. You’re just too chickenshit to outright say “I’m worried about you,” so pretending you need unpaid labor is a fantastic excuse.

Whether it’s grocery shopping or thrifting, if you’re doing anything involving trekking out into the public sphere, Dave people-watches. You don’t understand why he’s picked this habit up.

He does a once-over with every person in the same room as him, and it earns him a lot of side-eyes, as well as a few expressions along the line of ‘Hey, I’m down to board the bang-train with you, if you’re interested.’ That doesn’t seem to be Dave’s intention, though. Depending on what he sees, he either flattens himself to the side of the room, or he puffs himself out like a peacock with an ego the size of planet fucking Jupiter. At one point, he grabs you by the elbow and _yanks_ you out of the path of an older woman on the sidewalk; when you start raining down expletives on his head, he doesn’t bother in defending himself.

This new behavior is driving you insane. It has to be driving _him_ insane.

“Any reason why you’ve been acting more paranoid than a teen jacking it to a questionable fetish for the first time?” you snap the next time he pulls you over to the corner table of the cafe, closely watching a businessman cross the room to drop a coffee cup in the trash.

He’s taken to wearing the beanie and scarf at all times, so he can’t run his hand through his hair like you know he’s itching to. Instead, the corners of his mouth tick downwards.

“Nah,” he says. You both know it’s an astronomically big lie.

So you take a slow, deep breath. Exhale. Count from one to ten and then ten to one before looking him in the eyes again.

“I’m not going to waterboard you until you squeal, but I swear, sometimes you make it so tempting.”

Apparently threats of bodily harm are always a golden method for getting him to actually listening to you, because he starts curling in on himself nigh-immediately.

“I promise I’m not being dodgy because I love leading you around like I’m the guy with the stick the rope and the carrot, and you’re the dumb-as-bricks pony,” he says, coffee clutched between his hands like an emotional crutch. “It’s just hard to explain.”

That seems to be a recurring problem. Pointing it out would harsh but--

“That seems to be a recurring problem,” you snap. Dave leans a few inches back, like he’s trying to air out whatever tension you’re trying to build between you both. Which you weren’t. You’re just a bit too confrontational for your own good. But he looks hurt about it, and your blown-up resolve pops à la balloon-meets-needle style.

“Look,” you say, which is stupid because he’s already looking. “I’m not trying to fight with you about this. I just...”

You don’t have anything planned out to finish that sentence.

…

You just _what_ , Karkat?

“I just want to make sure you’re not downward-spiraling when I’m standing literally _right next to you_.”

Dave starts tapping out a rhythm on the table with a free hand. One, two, three-four, pause, five, six, one, two, three-four, pause, five, six. “I’m not gonna leave you in the dark if I’m hurting, dude.”

“Good,” you say, feeling only mildly better. “And once you think you’ve managed to find a way to explain the situation, I’m all ears.”

One, two, three-four, pause, five, six.

“Can do,” Dave says, features expressionless. “Can fuckin’ do.”

 

* * *

 

Another email from campus security shows up in your inbox with the headline, “CAMPUS ALERT.”

You don’t bother reading it.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, has Dave been asking you kinda weird questions recently?” John asks while you’re both perched on the second-hand sofa in his apartment, watching a movie you both spent twenty minutes trying to agree on. It’s the first night in a long, long time where you’ve managed to find an opportunity to get together. Your universities seem to love working against each other when it comes to proper scheduling.

There’s a huge handful of popcorn holding your mouth hostage when he sends that question your way, so he gets a few awkward seconds of chewing instead of an answer at first.

“Uhm,” you finally garble. “He hasn’t been asking questions. Just acting weird.”

John slowly nods, brow furrowing.

“I thought maybe he’d talked it over with you and a few other friends; I mean, the stuff he was asking about did not seem like super general knowledge.”

Well. Mark your interest as piqued.

“What millipede-riddled sandbox is that idiot digging around in now?” you ask, making a mental note to slow down your popcorn intake to just one piece at a time.

John shrugs. “Some stuff about Kaytel Desert. Like, really niche ghost stories and legends, from what I was getting.”

You frown.

The Kaytel Desert’s about half an hour’s drive away from campus, and it’s a hotspot for tourists because it’s haunted as fuck. It’s the prime setting for every kind of crime involving the suffix ‘-icide,’ and the one time you visited, you had contracted the world’s worst case of the heebie-jeebies.

“Why’d he ask you?”

“Probably because of the whole ghost-hunting phase, you know? If he asked me two years ago, I probably would have actually had something to offer.”

You toss a piece of popcorn at him, and it beans him right in the nose. “No, Egbert, that’s not what I was asking. I meant ‘why did he ask in the first place’.”

“Oh.” John blinks. “No idea.”

Someone on John’s TV screen whips out a rifle with all the flare of a supervillain and proceeds to blow another character’s head clean off. You both watch this happen without any reaction. The protagonist screams bloody murder, and the entire scene quickly devolves into a bloodbath topped off with bad special effects that make the movie more funny than exciting. The big-bad manages to shove the muzzle of his gun against the protagonist’s temple and the music gets super suspenseful. But then John lets out a long, agonized groan that has you grabbing the nearest pillow in shock. The guy has vocal chords that can reach ungodly levels of loud.

“Make a noise like that again, and I’ll assume your soul’s trying to forcefully escape from your body,” you growl, but John’s already talking.

“I brought up Dave, and now I can’t stop worrying about him! It’s just--he’s never acted this way before! I thought at first it was a concussion like you said, but the longer this has gone on, the more I’m starting to think it’s something totally different!”

And it makes sense that John’s sending himself into a panic over his friend behaving weirdly. He’s known Dave longer than you; all the way back since the era of pen-15 jokes and rage comics. The fact that they’re still friends after living through that abominable period of time is a true testament to their levels of camaraderie.

“Have you been talking to Rose?” you ask, because John’s way more in touch with Dave’s cousin than you’ve ever been.

“Yes,” he answers, eyes wide. “But pesterlogs and Skype aren’t good for mental profiling, apparently.”

Someone on the TV screen gets knocked off a high platform and falls into a pit, screaming the entire way down while you vacantly watch this scene play out.

“Damn it,” you say when the character hits the ground. “What the hell can we do?”

John grunts. “I’ve been trying my best to figure that out for a while now.”

“I’m with you, Egbert. I don’t think this is the kind of thing that’ll just resolve itself.”

“No waiting and seeing what happens, right?”

“No waiting and seeing.”

The movie ends a few minutes afterwards with generic love interest number three swooshing out of the woodwork to sweep the protagonist off his feet. Cue the sloppy kissing scene.

John doesn’t jokingly point out how cheesy and unnecessary the romance in the movie was, and you don’t openly mock the badly-executed action sequences that came long before the aforementioned sloppy kissing scene. You’re both in a kind of somber mood.

You stay somber long after you wrap things up for the night.

 

* * *

 

 Your period starts up a few days earlier than usual, and thus, you have to make a mad dash to the convenience store five minutes away for tampons.

It’s around eleven p.m. and you’re buried in four layers of clothes to ward off both the cold and the discomfort that comes from not wearing your binder outside. It’s not as bad as when you were fifteen and had just started transitioning, but the dysphoria’s always going to have a bit of a hold on you, even if you’ve out-logic'd it for the most part. The binder’s not worth putting back on when it’s so late, and your ribs are sore as hell. The sidewalks are pretty much empty of people anyways.

The cashier has her usual glazed-over expression when you come in and round up, then ring up your items; she gives an obligatory “thanks for shopping” before you’re out the door again. Nothing particularly remarkable. You walk back in relative silence and your fingers turn an unfortunate shade of red from the late-night chill.

But then _he_ shows up, and he looks like the end result of what would happen if the human embodiment of ugly hate-fucked a clown. You’d laugh at the guy for getting relentlessly savaged by life _just that hard_ , but he has a gun. So you don’t laugh.

He says that he just wants your wallet. The leather mini-bag that’s sitting in your backpocket with your student ID, your debit card, your cash, your membership cards, and every non-expired gift card this world has bestowed upon you. You hand it over. He says thank you in an almost sarcastic manner, then turns looks away for a split second, tucking your wallet into his pocket.

You see red.

You aim for his nuts with a stick-straight leg and the resulting noise makes him sound like he’s undergone reverse-puberty, but it doesn’t matter much because he’s already twisting to face you again, and then you’re getting clocked with a fist to the cheekbone but you grab him by the side of the neck and yank him down with you, then you hit the pavement and you’re scrambling to straddle and swing at his face but he’s flicking off the safety on his gun--it wasn’t off when he was _mugging you?_ You’re a fucking moron--and aiming it at somewhere on your person so you hit him in the temple for good measure and then--

BANG.

You stop.

He shoves you off and you comply without a fight, settling right back onto your ass with a stunned expression. Then he clambers up, takes one last, angry look at you, and gets the hell out of dodge.

Whatever.

You look down, and sure enough, your pant leg’s getting tie-dyed. More specifically, your thigh’s getting tie-dyed, and it burns more than ginger-and-pasty-as-polyester-white-tablecloth Terezi Pyrope sitting in 100 degree weather on the beach with no sunblock. It burns more than that one thousand degree knife blade Dave was talking about all those weeks ago. It burns more than the goddamn Sun _._

You take a shaky breath, and press the heel of your hand against the wound to staunch the bleeding.

“Fuck.”

 

* * *

 

 The hospital puts you on the heavy shit even though the wound’s not nearly as bad as they had anticipated--it missed your femoral artery by a long shot and got lodged into the meat of your thigh. This means the procedure for removing the bullet is way easier, even if the pain makes you nearly delirious.

You end up crying about it.

You end up crying about it a lot, actually.

It’s early the next morning when you get your first visitor, which is confusing considering the doctor hadn’t given you clearance to have anyone visit yet besides family or SOs.

Then Dave pokes his head through the door, and your eyebrows go shooting through the roof.

“How the fuck did you get in here?” you ask as he glides over to sit at the foot of your bed, calm and casual as can be. It gets on all of your nerves. But in a charming way.

“If any nurses swing by, I need you to have your itinerary of pet names locked and loaded,” he says instead of giving a proper answer. “Snookums, sweet pea, and kitty are already taken by yours truly, so cram that thinking cap on and get going, dude.”

“You told the staff that you’re my significant other.”

“I got a bad case of the sniffles before heading up to the desk and asking if Mister Vantas was going to live to see another day.”

The pain meds make the room wobble a little when you tilt your head back and bark out a tired laugh.

“You manipulative bastard.”

The corner of his mouth lifts, which is the most positive reaction you’ve gotten out of him since he told you about his dream in the diner. “Hey, better me than John.”

And he’s got a point. John’s an awful actor.

“So,” you say.

“So,” he echoes.

“What’s so important that you couldn’t wait a few extra hours to get in here?”

He cocks his head to the side and does his trademark shrug.

“It’s not every day that your friend gets shot with a real fuckin’ gun, man.”

You snort. “As opposed to a fake fucking gun?”

Through the aviators, you see his eyes roll, lazy and self-assured. “I’d call you a condescending dick, but I’ll give you the benefit of doubt and blame your attitude on the pain meds. And shit, while we’re talking about methods of coping: I brought a gift.” He digs something out of his pocket, and tosses it you.

It’s a box of Hello Kitty bandaids.

“I hate you,” you drone.

“They’re courtesy of me and John,” Dave says, ignoring your remark. “If you don’t send us a ‘thank you’ card in the next couple of days while you’re sitting around on your ass, we’re ending this friendship.”

You lean back, letting your head hit the propped-up pillow behind you.

“Looks like God’s finally answering my prayers,” you sigh.

You hear him shift to lay down at the foot of your bed, twisting to avoid your legs before getting comfortable.

“Hey,” he says, tone laced with mock-warning. “Assholes have feelings too.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

He sticks around for a few hours of back-and-forth banter, which is all you really have energy for, honestly. There’s something about the way he talks today that’s so rigidly different from the way he’s been acting recently; like he’s not biting his tongue every time he tries to speak, or his sentences are coming out crisper, more composed. It leaves a few questions that sit heavy in the back of your head. But that’s where you keep them. You like how easy it is to talk to him despite being drugged up, and you’re not going to be the moron to screw it all up.

However, you _are_ the moron that falls asleep mid-conversation.

Dave must decides that’s the signal that it’s time to leave, but he does give you a parting gift.

A sticky note with crudely-drawn dick sporting a cartoonish face is slapped onto your bedside table when you wake up at four in the afternoon. And to the side of the picture in chicken scratch, the note says: “IT’S OK TO FEEL DOWN SOMETIMES. YOU’LL ALWAYS FIND A WAY TO GET BACK UP!”

You crumple it up and toss it to the floor eventually.

But not before hacking up a goddamn lung.

 

**Author's Note:**

> so. this is all very impromptu, ahah. i got hit with a big old wave of inspiration and typed this all out in about a day, pffft. it's messy and vague but i really want to keep it that way, just because i'm trying to keep this whole thing mysterious n short n sweet... (possibly more than 15k for a story is apparently short and sweet to me. RIP.) 
> 
> this was honestly the warm-fuzzy chapter so ahah. uh. buckle up, i guess?
> 
> anyways, the official song for this fic is ["when i'm a dead boy" by AJJ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAR3P83UBYY)! it's also where i got the title from. 
> 
> i don't want to ramble too much more just because i'll start giving stuff away, so final notes:  
> -sorry for errors. i type quickly and my brain loves skipping over words, but i'll fix whatever i catch!  
> -there's a lot up in the air, and if you want to speculate, feel free too! instead of giving you confirmation i'll be happy to offer one (1) winking emoticon as my statement of neutrality, lol  
> -this is all kind of a new style of writing for me, so it's been a bit awkward, and my confidence is a bit lower than usual. but i'm having more fun now that i'm getting into the swing of things!  
> -and finally, thanks so much for reading!


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